“It was unlikely,” Calvin added. “But we wanted to take every precaution.”
“What happened?” Elvi finally managed to say once her thirst was quenched.
“You didn’t tell her?” Fayez shot at Calvin. “Els, honey, you had a reaction to—”
“No,” she cut him off. “I know that. Where are we? I feel gravity. Are we through the transit?”
As she spoke, Calvin began putting his instruments away. It looked like whatever had happened to her, the treatment for it was over.
“Yes,” Fayez said. “We’re in Tecoma right now. We’re finishing our deceleration burn.”
“I’ve been out that long?”
“I was scared to death, Els. I’m getting a full battery of tests run to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
“Sagale’s schedule won’t—”
“Sagale agreed with me. I was surprised too. I think the prospect of losing Duarte’s pet biologist had him pissing his uniform.”
Calvin snorted at that. “I’m done here. Do you need anything else?”
“No,” Elvi said. “Yes. When can I go back to work?”
“Now, if you feel up to it.”
“Thank you, Calvin,” Elvi said.
Calvin gave her a salute and a smile. “My pleasure, Major,” he said, then left the compartment.
“Maybe you should rest,” Fayez said. He was frowning at her. Elvi laughed. He almost never frowned, and with his baby face it made him look like a petulant child.
“I’m fine,” she said. And then, “Okay, I’m not fine. I’ll be fine. It’s just travel.”
“I don’t like it,” Fayez said. She took his hand. Her skin felt sticky. She was going to need a real shower.
“So, Tecoma system,” she said. “The probes said it was a neutron star?” She tried sitting up. Her head swam a little, so she stopped there.
“It is,” Fayez agreed, putting a hand on her back to help steady her. “But, you know, weirder.”
The dizziness passed, and her eyes were focusing better as well. The text on the screens around her became actual letters and numbers.
“Help me up,” she said, then dropped her feet to the floor. Fayez put an arm around her waist as she tried standing. Her legs were a little weak, but the gravity felt like they were only burning at a quarter g or so, so it was easy to stay upright. Fayez gave her a look, then took his arm away, waiting close by to grab her if she fell. She didn’t.
“I’ll need some clothes,” she said. Fayez nodded and opened a nearby storage locker. “Weirder how?”
“Emptied,” Fayez said, then tossed her uniform and some clean underclothes on the couch. “Massive rapidly spinning neutron star, no planets, planetoids, asteroids, nothing.”
Elvi pulled off the thin smock she wore in the submersion couch and headed to the shower. Fayez followed her in, carrying a towel. The blast of hot water made her dizzy again, but one hand on the wall and some deep-breathing exercises cleared it up in a few seconds. Fayez watched closely, but once he was sure she was all right, he relaxed. As she washed the last of the goop off her body, Elvi said, “They cleared everything out to make a diamond backup drive too.”
“This is more than that. I don’t mean no planetary bodies. I mean no nothing. No micrometeors. No dust. No spare protons floating around. The vacuum here is as hard as it can get.”
“That’s… Okay. Weirder.” Elvi turned the water off, and Fayez tossed her the towel. “I mean, is that even possible?”
“No. Not unless there’s something keeping it clean. We’re still in the Milky Way. There should be some spare crap floating through now and then. So not only is the system cleaned out, something’s actively keeping it cleaned out. And—get this—the gate is five times farther out from the star than any of the other gates. And it’s above the plane of the ecliptic. Ninety degrees. Don’t even get me started on the star.”
“What’s going on with the star?”
“It’s massive. I mean, like, spit-on-it-and-it’ll-start-to-collapse-into-a-black-hole-level massive.”
“Good that there’s no spit around, then.”
“Right? It turns out neutron stars aren’t much to look at. Unless you can see magnetic fields, they’re just… underwhelming. I mean the densest matter possible, forces so powerful as to break space-time? Sure. Bright as hell, you bet. But I was expecting a light show or something. It just looks like another sun, but smaller and kind of angry about it. This one is spinning fast enough to land in the pulsar range. We’re far enough away to avoid the worst of the magnetic disturbance.”
She took a deep breath. She could hear the anxiety in his words. She knew what they meant.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You aren’t. You could have died.”
“I didn’t, though. And now, I’ll be fine.”
“Okay.”
Elvi finished drying off and stuffed the towel into the recycler. Fayez pulled a jar of scalp cream out of a cabinet and began rubbing it into her short, tight curls with his fingertips. It felt wonderful to have him massaging her head. When you find a man who takes pleasure in helping you avoid dry scalp, Elvi thought, you keep him.
“You can do that all day if you want,” she said.
“If we had all day, my attentions would begin moving south,” he replied with a grin. “But we’re killing our burn in about two hours, and I don’t believe that you’re going to wait one more second to start working.”
He closed up the cream jar and put it away while she started pulling on her clothes.
“So what were they thinking?” Elvi said.
“Hmm?”
“Making a neutron star so big it’s hovering on the edge of collapse, and then clearing everything out of the system so that it doesn’t. Moving the ring out of the ecliptic.”
“You think they made a neutron star? Seems more likely they just built a gate to a dud system.”
“How? There had to be life here for them to hijack, or the gate wouldn’t have been built. This was a living system like Sol that got turned into…” She waved her hand.
“Yeah,” Fayez agreed. “I don’t know. Honestly, this miracles-and-wonders thing feels like drinking from a fire hose sometimes.”
Elvi finished with her uniform, then brushed her teeth as Fayez waited and watched her. She gave herself one last critical look in the mirror, then said, “Let’s go see the boss.”
Fayez grabbed her and undid her careful uniform straightening with a hug. “Thanks for not dying, Els.”
Forty-eight hours later, they’d gone through the drill. The ship’s system had analyzed the telescopic data. Elvi had gone to pay her respects to the catalyst the way she always did, and then performed the experiment. The protomolecule reached out, and the data streamed in. The Falcon searching for any change, any effect. This time, Elvi actually let herself sleep in between. Near-death experiences wore her out, apparently, even if she hadn’t been aware of them at the time. In addition to which, this time, there wasn’t much to see.
When they’d finished their analysis, Sagale came to the bridge and braced himself on one hand-hold and one foot-hold. His eyes shifted from one screen to the next, taking in the data streams with an air of pleasure.
“Mehmet,” Elvi said.
“Major Okoye,” Sagale said, and nodded toward the main monitor. Magnified so that it filled the screen, the tiny but massive star was the only object within nearly two light-years of the Tecoma gate. “Tell me that this system is the most important scientific discovery of all time.”
“No,” Elvi replied. “Pretty sure the big green diamond still wins that prize. But it is amazing.”
The neutron star on the screen was too hot to radiate much energy as visible light, but the screen still had to dim it down to keep it from blinding everyone in the room.
“More than three stellar masses stuffed into a ball half the size of Rhode Island,” Jen said.
“What’s a road island?” Travon a
sked. He’d been a Martian, back before they were all Laconians.
“Major Okoye,” Sagale said, ignoring the banter. “Am I correct that this is exactly what it looks like? A single unusable star in a system devoid of other artifacts or exploitable planets?”
Something in his tone caught Elvi’s attention. It had a stiff formality to it. As though he were asking her questions under oath. She felt like they were engaging in some sort of ritual that he understood and she didn’t.
“That’s what it looks like,” she said carefully. “Yes.”
Sagale nodded his massive head at her. The pleasure seemed to radiate from him. “Come to my office in five minutes.”
He pulled himself away, disappearing down the corridor. Fayez met her gaze and lifted an eyebrow.
“Makes me nervous too,” she said.
She checked the data one last time like she was going over her class notes before a test. She had a sense that there was something in it she’d overlooked. It wasn’t a feeling she liked.
“Coffee?” Sagale asked when she arrived. He was floating next to the beverage machine inset in one of the bulkheads of his office. Two drinking bulbs drifted next to him. It was the first time he’d ever offered her anything in hospitality. It made her nervous.
“Sure,” she said so that he wouldn’t notice.
The machine hissed as it injected cups of coffee into the bulbs, one at a time. “Sweetener? Whitener?” Sagale asked, still fussing with the machine.
“No.”
Sagale turned to her and gently pushed one of the bulbs in her direction. She caught it and depressed the bubble on the lid that opened the flow to the drinking tube, then took a sip. The coffee was just right, hot but not scalding, bitter and strong and vaguely nutty.
“Thank you,” she said, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“I want to extend the thanks of the Laconian Empire for your work on this project. Now that we have identified a system of no utility, we are moving to the military phase of the operation,” Sagale said after a short pause while he sipped at his coffee.
“The what?”
“Two ships are entering this system as we speak,” he said. “They are both uncrewed, and controlled remotely from this vessel. Both are large freighters. One is empty. The other has a payload.”
“A payload?”
“The high consul has been able to use the construction platforms over Laconia to isolate and contain antimatter. The second ship is carrying slightly over twenty kilograms in a magnetic containment device.”
Elvi felt light-headed again. Maybe she was still recovering from her near-death experience. Maybe it was her superior officer telling her that he had enough explosive power to glass the surface of a planet. Probably it was both. She took a moment to get her breath back.
“And why?” she asked.
“The high consul’s directive for this expedition was twofold,” Sagale said. “The first was the mission you were briefed about. You and your team have done all that could be asked in this effort, and my reports back to naval command reflect this.”
“Okay. Thanks. What was the second thing?” Elvi asked.
“The second aspect of this mission is outside your expertise, which is why it was kept on a need-to-know basis. We were to find a gate-connected system with minimal value. Such as this one.”
She let go of the coffee bulb, and it began gently floating away. “Am I allowed to know what phase two is? Because if I don’t need to know, it seems sort of mean to have this conversation.”
“You are. In fact you are essential to it, and I have every confidence that you will continue to excel as our mission changes, though you will no longer have operational command,” Sagale said. There was something like sympathy in his eyes. For the very first time, Elvi got the sense that Sagale liked her. Or at least respected her. “The high consul’s first priority is to find a way to defend humanity against whatever destroyed the gate builders.” He paused for a moment like he didn’t quite believe what he was about to say. Like he’d been waiting for a long time to say it. “The test we are about to perform is the beginning of that process.”
He tapped at his desk, and a map of the Tecoma system appeared above it. The neutron star at its center, the distant gate, the Falcon floating at the midway point, and the two new freighters drifting near the entry point.
“We are going to monitor this system with every instrument at our disposal, just as we always have,” Sagale said. “But this time, out in the hub network, traffic control is running ships through the gates until the energy transfer load reaches the critical state. When the critical level is reached, we are going to transit the empty freighter from this system.”
“You’re going to deliberately dutchman a ship?”
“We are. When it vanishes, and while the energy transfer load is still high enough to make transits impossible, I will set the trigger on the antimatter containment field and transit the second ship. It too should vanish, but it will have a timer set to detonate the load.”
Elvi felt her stomach cramp up like he’d punched her in the solar plexus. It was suddenly hard to breathe.
“Why would you—”
“Because one of two things is true,” Sagale said. “Either there is an intelligence that lies beyond those gates that is making the choice to destroy our ships, or there is some natural effect of the gate system itself that does it. This is how we will determine that.”
Elvi reached for a handhold in the bulkhead behind her, and pulled herself to the wall. Her heart was going faster.
“You think you can kill them?”
“That isn’t the issue. Whether something on the other side dies or doesn’t die, what matters is that it is punished. After this experiment, some time later we will run the energy up to the point of another dutchman and see if the ship is taken. If the ship survives transit, we will know the bomb convinced our opponent to change their stance toward us.”
“That’s a terrible plan.”
“If it does change, we’ll know the enemy is capable of change. That it’s intentional, and possibly intelligent. If not, we’ll repeat the test until we’re reasonably certain that no change will be forthcoming. I take it from your expression that you have some thoughts on the mission you’d like to share.”
Elvi’s voice sounded outraged, even to her. “The last time we made them angry, they turned off every consciousness in the Sol system and there was a massive surge in virtual particle activity. They fired a bullet that broke spooky interactions in ways we’re still trying to make sense of. Every one of those things defies our understanding of how reality works. So we’re going to throw a bomb at them?”
Sagale nodded, agreeing and dismissing her at the same time. “If we could send a sternly worded letter, we’d try that. But this is how you negotiate with something that you can’t speak to. When it does something we don’t like, we hurt it. Every time it does something we don’t like, we hurt it again. Only once. If it can understand cause and effect, it will get our message.”
“Jesus.”
“We aren’t the aggressor here. We didn’t hit anyone first. We just haven’t hit anyone back until now.”
She could hear Winston Duarte in the word choices. Even in the cadence Sagale delivered them with. It made Elvi want to throw her coffee bulb at his face. Fortunately, it had drifted several meters away, saving her from a court-martial.
“Thanks to you, we’ve found a sample system. This is the safest place in the empire for humanity to conduct these tests.”
“This is a bad, bad idea. I don’t think you’re hearing what I’m saying.”
“When humans first began experimenting with fission bombs,” Sagale said, as if she hadn’t spoken, “they used empty islands for their tests. Consider this our Bikini Atoll.”
Elvi laughed at him, but there was no humor in it.
“My God, you people really are this dumb,” she said. Sagale frowned at that, but she powered on anyway. �
��First of all, the Bikini Atoll wasn’t empty. The people that lived there had their homes stolen and were sent away. And the islands were filled with plant and animal life that was annihilated.”
“We have established that this system has nothing that—”
Elvi didn’t let him finish. “But putting that aside for a moment, I just said whatever lives inside those gates has a very different understanding of physics than we do. Is it limited to taking its anger out on only one solar system? You don’t know that. You can’t know that.”
“Passivity didn’t save the gate builders. It won’t save us. The high consul has considered the risks and judged a proactive, direct path to be the best option available.”
He spread his hands. What can be done? As if Duarte’s word were a force of nature, inescapable and unquestionable. It was like talking to a recording.
“You are about to run an n-equals-one experiment where one is the number of universes we can break trying to satisfy Duarte’s curiosity.”
Chapter Eleven: Alex
The shipyards on Callisto were a perfect example of the old idea that ships and buildings keep learning even after they’re built. History took whatever it found and used it for what was happening at the time, remaking the spaces into whatever worked well enough to get by at the moment, until history itself became a kind of architect.
Callisto had been a divided base once. Pretty much the same way medieval villages had been built just outside castle walls, civilian shipyards had grown up around the older MCRN base until the military and commercial concerns were almost the same size. The Free Navy had raided the Martian side even before the Free Navy really existed, pounding that half of the base into dust and bodies. Then, in the aftermath of the great defection that became the seeds of Laconia, the rebuilding of the Martian shipyards had been left incomplete. During the starving years, it had been abandoned. But the real estate was there, and as the need grew again, what had been military structures were taken over again. Nothing died without becoming the foundation for what came after.
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